Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday August 08, 2017 @08:50PM
from the come-together dept.

tedlistens writes from a report via Fast Company: Robots are consistent, indefatigable workers, but they don't improvise well. Changes on the assembly line require painstaking reprogramming by humans, making it hard to switch up what a factory produces. Now researchers at German industrial giant Siemens say they have a solution: a factory that uses AI to orchestrate the factory of the future, by both programming factory robots and handing out assignments to the humans working alongside them. The program, called a "reasoner," figures out the steps required to make a product, such as a chair; then it divides the assignments among machines based their capabilities, like how far a robotic arm can reach or how much weight it can lift. The team has proved the technology can work on a small scale with a test system that uses just a few robots to make five types of furniture (like stools and tables), with four kinds of leg configurations, six color options, and three types of floor-protector pads, for a total of 360 possible products.

Siemens's originally gave its automated factory project the badass Teutonic moniker "UberManufacturing." They weren't thinking of the German word connoting "superior," however, but rather of the on-demand car service. Part of their vision is that automated factories can generate bids for specialty, limited-run manufacturing projects and compete for customers in an online marketplace. "You could say, 'I want to build this stool,' and whoever has machines that can do that can hand in a quote, and that was our analogy to Uber," says Florian Michahelles, who heads the research group.

The thing here is that the "Teutonic Marker" would have been "ÜberManufacturing" or "UeberManufacturing", which looks and sounds quite different to a German native speaker than "UberManufacturing". They would never have used the former.

There's a lot of things that use AI that folks like, for example how a washer spins their loads for efficiently. There's also the new car collision avoidance stuff. Then there's the Cardiac devices the examine and heal certain defects in humans, and lab pigs.

We just have to figure out how our unconscious mind is able to calculate intuitive decisions based on previous experience and knowledge, and connect seemingly unrelated experiences to form new original thoughts, and then emulate it all in a computer program. How hard can it be?

I've been calling this method a "process compiler", by analogy to software compilers. You have a high level process in manufacturing, and want to convert it to individual steps for machines or people to execute, taking into account what their capabilities are, and schedule availability. The need for this comes up with flexible manufacturing, where you are not making a long series of identical items. To make it work, you need metadata on the CAD parts files, that identify materials and heat-treating and s

Anything with "AI" in it is bullshit. There is no AI, and likely never will be. All we have are parlor tricks and algorithms.

This comment is as insightful as sacrificing virgins to help with the next harvest. We know with nearly 100% certainty we will have AI at some point. We already know human-level intelligence is possible, so it is only a matter of time until it can be recreated artificially. The only thing stopping AI is the extinction of our species before we figure it out.